My Linux Foundation Mentorship Experience with CNCF:OpenEBS project
My mentorship Experience with LFX: openEBS, an opensource project aimed to simplify storage in Kubernetes !
Hola Everyone !!!
This article is about my whole journey as a Mentee working on OpenEBS project with the help from my mentor Kiran Mova and other members Abhishek Agrawal, Sahil Raja, and Niladri Halder.
I am Rahul Agrawal, pursuing MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
How it all started?
After completing my GSoC project last year in 2020 under the NRNB organization, I gained enough knowledge of a few of the DevOps technologies and open source. I was actually very fascinated with the terms automation and container Orchestration. That was the time I came to know about the home for all these cloud tools and that was Cloud-Native Computer Foundation (CNCF). So I started exploring more about different projects offered by CNCF to the students, similar to GSoC. And that’s how I found the Linux Foundation Mentorship program.
Why I choose OpenEBS ?
Last December I was working with one of the ML startups and there we had a serious problem with Storage. We were running on Kubernetes but it was very hard to manage the data and many times it resulted in data loss. So I started exploring some solutions and that’s how I found OpenEBS. Although my mentorship project was not on the core architecture side but somehow I wanted to get more familiar with the OpenEBS community and that’s the reason why I opted for this particular project.
Results announcement !!!
On 26th Feb, I was eagerly waiting for the results from the morning itself but didn’t get anything till evening. I too had my mid-term exams at that time but was not able to focus on the studies. Finally, after the long wait in the night, I got the selection mail. It was party time :)
Getting into the program
After a week or so the project finally started and I got to e-meet my mentor Kiran and the other members of the organization. We started discussing about the scope of the project, the goals, and non-goals. OpenEBS architecture was completely new for me and I was not very used to Kubernetes but my mentor gave me sufficient time to explore everything. I also poked Niladri many times during this period to help me while setting up my development environment and he helped me every time. After playing with the setup, we finally started working on the project.
Sync up with my mentors
In the starting, we had weekly sync-ups but when the project started gaining some momentum we decided to have sync-ups every alternate weekday to understand if I am facing any blockers and a catchup in general. I was also encouraged to organize sync-up sessions whenever I faced any issue and needed their help. We kept an agenda prior to the meeting, and each of the discussion points was discussed at length. During my GSoC project, the project on which I was working was very loaded and I had to work for long hours but this time I always got enough time to reach my goals. My mentor was very gentle and he always gave me work in small pieces.
Major Learnings from the Project
During this project, I had a lot of important learnings and takeaways.
I came to know about the importance of perfection. As I was working on the dashboard, it was also very much needed to focus on UI/UX. So we literally had about 50+ iterations and lots of twitches. I got great feedbacks and enjoyed tackling all of them.
Earlier I had more theoretical knowledge about the Kubernetes but this time I was able to do it practically where I tackled lots of bugs which can only occur while getting the hands dirty.
Final Thoughts
It was a great learning and fun experience working with OpenEBS project. This project gave me a lot of knowledge of different storage engines, Prometheus, and Grafana.
I would like to thank my mentor Kiran Mova and other members Abhishek Agrawal, Sahil Raja, and Niladri Halder for being very helpful, patient, and open to feedback. The project would not have been completed without their inputs and I wholeheartedly appreciate their inputs and efforts in helping me.
What’s Next
Although the mentorship has ended but that’s the beauty of open-source that anybody from anywhere can contribute to some project of his/her choice anytime and can improve the skills. I have another internship lined up for now but I will try to take out time from my schedule and keep on contributing to the project.
